Book Review: Deep Fury by David Freed

The seventh installment of the Cordell Logan mystery series finds our former fighter pilot turned flight instructor (and aspiring private investigator) trying not to get involved with his nonagenarian landlady Mrs. Schmulowitz’s quixotic run for city council. While he has no interest in politics, he’s also perfectly happy to be living in Mrs. Schmulowitz’s garage, no matter what his girlfriend has to say about it. Layne Sterling is a former CIA agent who is bright, beautiful, and a total catch. She thinks it’s high time that she and Logan moved into grown-up accommodations of their own, despite Logan’s reluctance to leave his admittedly high-energy landlady to her own devices.

Those arguments are all put on the back burner, however, when he learns that the hitherto unidentified dead body that recently fell out of the sky some towns over belongs to his former Air Force wingman Pete “Chocks” Hostetler. Feeling guilty at having fallen out of touch, Logan flies his Cessna 172, the Ruptured Duck, the hour or so to Chocks’ last known address in Santa Isabella to pay his respects to Chocks’ widow.

Miranda Hostetler paints a very different picture of his former wingman than Logan was familiar with. According to the seething Miranda, Chocks was an abusive drunk who was involved in shady business, a far cry from the upright airman Logan knew. Instead of shaking his memories of the man, this contradiction only underscores Logan’s determination to figure out how Chocks had come to be thrown out of an aircraft, naked, to his unceremonious death.

Layne, of course, wants to know more about why Logan feels so much loyalty to someone he hadn’t even spoken to in years. As briefly as he can, Logan tells her about one particular mission he’d run with Chocks during Desert Storm:

I told her about ejecting, hitting the ground hard, scrambling out of my rig, and taking cover in a dry river channel with my pistol, my mouth as dry as sand, hoping my emergency locator transmitter still worked. I could see a column of enemy troop carriers–what looked like an entire mechanized infantry company–coming to get me.

 

“Then, out of nowhere, here comes Chocks, blazing away. One pass after another, blowing up bad guys. He stayed on station until he was almost out of fuel. Kept ‘em pinned down until I could get out. He took a thirty-seven-millimeter round in his leg. Broke the femur. Ran out of gas coming into Khalid. Had to dead-stick the landing. They quit counting the shell holes in his airplane when they got to two hundred.[“]

While he knows he can never repay his former wingman for saving his life, Logan is determined to find out who killed Chocks and to subsequently avenge his fallen friend. His investigations bring him to the attention of some powerful and very dangerous people, but it might very well be his own recklessness that does him in. Even if he does escape death in his pursuit of the truth, will he be able to keep his relationship with an increasingly frustrated Layne alive? As he doggedly chases down leads while flying around California, he can’t help but think about how he’s in danger of losing her:

There was no mistaking it for anything other than a private strip […] Only in emergencies are general aviation pilots allowed to land at such airfields without prior permission.

 

So that’s what I had–an “emergency.”

 

I pulled the mixture to idle cutoff and switched off the ignition. As I glided in, dead-stick style, Layne popped into my head, how she was all about planning and preparing for any contingency, while I was all about winging it, adapting on the fly, and overcoming. Our respective approaches to problem-solving were antithetical to each other. Maybe Layne and I were fundamentally antithetical to each other, too. I tried not to think of her.

Deep Fury has all the swagger of late 20th-century action thrillers while realistically updating circumstances for the 21st century. David Freed is an award-winning journalist and a licensed pilot who knows how to accurately capture the nuances of both real and larger-than-life situations, as his protagonist juggles a complex murder investigation with personal tribulations. The cast of colorful characters doesn’t necessarily make the best individual choices, but that only adds to the convincingness of the story, as Logan’s unwavering sense of loyalty guides him through his journey toward truth and justice, no matter the personal cost.